Please help!!! My hard drive won't boot!!!

**forumNewbie** · April 29th, 2003, 04:03 PM

Hi all,
I have a serious problem, i think!! This is what I am experiencing..
Yesterday when I am returned home from College, my computer which was running fine till I left for college in the morning was showing "Invalid system disk. Press any key when ready". I thought the power was down sometime in the morning and proceeded to reboot it. Again it gave the same message.
I was running Win98SE on the machine. The night before this happened, I used Norton Utilities 2001 to Optimize my drive to run faster. There were no issues after I performed that. As a matter of fact, the morning before I left for college, I was listening to music on my machine.
To add to the details, I had EZ-BIOS installed on my drive so that I can access my second hard drive which I planned on dual booting but which I never did.
Then after my experience I used 98 Boot Disk and used fdisk to check the status of the drive and it said "non-DOS file system" on the drive. I took it to my friend's house, who was using Win2K, and hooked it up as a secondary drive and to my surprise, all the data were intact in the drive and it showed the status as being healthy in the Disk Management console. It even showed that the disk is of FAT32 file system.
Can anyone please clarify what went wrong and any suggestions on how to fix it. I am guessing that the disk optimization that I performed the night before was the cause of the problem. Is this a clue? Help needed, please.....
Thanx in advance...

P.S: I installed Win2K on the second drive and accessing the data on the first drive through it currently...

**krohnjw** · April 29th, 2003, 04:12 PM

Any chance there is a disk in the floppy drive? sounds simple but may be the problem.

**forumNewbie** · April 29th, 2003, 04:22 PM

No....I know pretty sure that my problem is more than that...

And did I mention I want a resolution with nothing happening to my data....

**EvilRick** · April 29th, 2003, 04:27 PM

Be sure that the 98 partition is set to "Active". Set it using "FDISK" from a 98 boot disk.

Or . . .

You could have just hosed your MBR.

Use a 98 boot disk and type in;

"FDISK /MBR"

The reboot w/o the floppy in the drive.

You might wanna remove the 2nd HDD so it doesn't mess up your 2K install.

**PresterJohn** · April 29th, 2003, 04:33 PM

if you can read files off the drive then the file table is okay. if the corruption is only extends to the MBR or boot loader then you have a good chance of getting it back. if the corruption extends to the system file areas, then you won't be able to fix it short of reinstalling

do the following:

1) boot with a win98 boot disk and at the dos prompt type: fdisk /mbr reboot...is the system OK.

2) if not, repeat #1 but type instead at the dos prompt: sys c:. reboot afterwards.

**forumNewbie** · April 29th, 2003, 04:42 PM

Hi Prester
Of the 2 methods that you had mentioned, which one will affect the data already present on the drive??

**PresterJohn** · April 29th, 2003, 05:12 PM

neither of them one wil overwrite any data files you have.

**screen** · April 29th, 2003, 05:14 PM

Isn't the EZ-BIOS a BIOS overlay for older systems for use with larger hard drives? If this is true, and if in the system BIOS you have set the boot order as "A, C, CDROM" or "A, CDROM, C", and you tried to boot with a win98 disk, you might have bypassed the BIOS overlay. After booting from the windows 98, you might not be able to see the harddrive and fdisk calls it a non-DOS partition -- that's what happened with me with an old machine.

If your boot order starts with "Floppy/A" then try to set the boot order with "C or HD0" as the first device. The BIOS overlay will ask you to press a key to boot from floppy. At this time, put the floppy in the drive and boot from it. Now you might be able to see the harddrive.

-Screen

**PresterJohn** · April 29th, 2003, 05:23 PM

screen actually points out something which i overlooked

you mention that when you boot w/a win98 boot disk that the partition table is non-dos? you also mention that you're using ex-bios. did you actually use the bios translation supplied w/that software? need clarification since your original post is unclear.

btw, IMO the boot order, screen mentions, shouldn't have any bearing because even if c: is set before a:, the fact that your hd is not booting now clearly points to it being a problem related to c:

**forumNewbie** · April 29th, 2003, 05:35 PM

I had installed EZ-Bios previously when I was trying to install a second drive (40GB) and my BIOS which was old, didnt see the whole drive. But since then I took off the 2nd drive and was using just the older drive (which is the drive currently giving trouble). Didn't bother to uninstall the BIOS overlay as well and so it still remains. Is this clear?

Thanx for the replies, guys....

**screen** · April 29th, 2003, 08:09 PM

Originally posted by PresterJohn

btw, IMO the boot order, screen mentions, shouldn't have any bearing because even if c: is set before a:, the fact that your hd is not booting now clearly points to it being a problem related to c:

The OS does not know that there is a bios overlay. When the OS installs the boot loader, it installs in a place that the BIOS overlay mentions as the boot record. It could be possible that the bios overlay is intact and the MBR is destroyed. IMO.

forumNewbie can you tell us if the display shows the ez-bios information before the error "invalid system disk" is displayed. If it doesn't then he should use the ez-bios disk to restore the ezbios information. That could solve the problem.
If it shows the ez-bios information then he should try to boot with a floppy after the ez-bios is loaded and then try to repair the MBR with the procedures explained by the previous posters.

-Screen

-Screen

**PresterJohn** · April 29th, 2003, 08:40 PM

from your description it sounds like ez-bios is still active...

screen's synopsis is correct...follow the steps outline for a posible fix.

**forumNewbie** · April 30th, 2003, 01:13 PM

Hey there guys...

Yeah, Prester is correct. My EZ-Bios is still active... and so I followed the methods that were suggested.

I tried fdisk /mbr and some files were transfered and then i went into C:\windows and then tried to boot windows from there... It gave me a BSOD saying

" Invalid VxD Dynamic link Call from C2UDFFS(01) + 0002AFA to device "048B" , service 1.
Your windows configuration is invalid. Run the windows setip program again to correct this problem.
To continue press Y or Enter...."

and so I tried "Y" and now it said

" VFAT device Initialization failed. A device or resource required by VFAT is not present or is unavailable. VFAT cannot continue loading. System halted"

and then I tried SYS C: and it tried to read data from the boot floppy disk and then it gave an error message saying "Data error reading drive A. Abort, retry, failed?"

Does this mean that the floppy was bad? But the floppy worked without any problem when i replaced the mbr...

After trying all these the data were still fully intact on my older drive..

P.S: When I booted from floppy after BIOS overlay started, I checked the drive status and this time it said
"Status 'A', Partition type: PRI DOS, Usage: 100%"

**PresterJohn** · April 30th, 2003, 01:58 PM

>VFAT device Initialization failed. A device or resource

looks like the windows system files are corrupted. not much else at this point but to copy your data off the drive and reinstall windows again.

**screen** · April 30th, 2003, 03:57 PM

Boot from DOS floppy (after ez-bios). Go to C:\windows. See if you find anything wierd, i.e., lots of files zero size, files with wierd characters, some huge files. If you did not find any of the wierdness in the directory structure, start windows in safe mode using win /d:m in the c:\windows directory. There is little chance that windows will start because of problems with vfat drivers. If it starts, you might have some chance of repairing it.

If windows does not start, as PresterJohn says, backup your data and re-install windows.

Good luck.

-Screen.

**forumNewbie** · April 30th, 2003, 04:12 PM

Thanks Prester and Screen for your suggestions....I will try it and come back to you guys when I am done....

But one more thing before that...I had mentioned some error with "sys" command.... Here is the requote

>and then I tried SYS C: and it tried to read data from the boot >floppy disk and then it gave an error message saying "Data >error reading drive A. Abort, retry, failed?"

>Does this mean that the floppy was bad? But the floppy worked >without any problem when i replaced the mbr...

What do you guys think the problem is??

**screen** · April 30th, 2003, 05:37 PM

I think the floppy is fine. Try to boot from the floppy after the ez-bios to confirm this. The problem with the floppy access started after you try to start windows (or you tried to boot to windows directly). It appears to be some problem with the files on your harddrive.

-Screen

**forumNewbie** · May 1st, 2003, 09:59 AM

This one just struck to my mind...
When I was running my machine on the older HD (I mean, in the haydays when everything was working fine

), I had Norton AV which was enabled at startup...So my question is, will it prevent from copying system files to the drive thinking that some kind of virus is trying to access the system files? If so, is there anyway I it can disabled?

I am asking too many questions, huh?